Monday, April 20, 2015

Wrestler Turned Tulsa Deputy Charged With Murder

Killer
deputy Robert Bates isn’t the Tulsa sheriff’s only problem. The
embattled lawman is being sued by one of his former deputies—a pro
wrestler who’s in jail on murder charges.
Warren Cole
Crittenden—known to Oklahoma wrestling fans as “The Real Deal,” “The
Masked Outlaw,” and “The Cooler,” not to mention “Super Invader” and
“Super Destroyer II”—is one officer listed as a plaintiff in a 2011
wrongful-termination suit filed against Tulsa County Sheriff Stanley
Glanz.
As Glanz faces scrutiny over his buddy Bates—a millionaire volunteer
cop who killed an unarmed black man after apparently mistaking his gun
for a Taser —he’s also warring with former employees in a years-long court battle.
On Thursday, the media called the 73-year-old Bates’s training
credentials into question. Bates has said an Arizona sheriff’s office
provided his “active shooter training,” but officials there denied he
ever trained with them and have no records of him doing so.
Meanwhile, Tulsa County sheriff’s department supervisors were reassigned after refusing to falsify Bates’s training records, The Tulsa World reported. (The sheriff’s department has denied these allegations.)
The death of ex-con Eric Harris was captured on police body cameras,
with Bates heard shouting “Taser!” before saying, “I shot him. I’m
sorry.” The viral footage adds to a string of cases of unarmed black men
being killed by police.
But Tulsa’s sheriff has been fending off attacks well before the controversy surrounding Harris’s death.
Cole
Crittenden, 44, was a former Tulsa detention officer and deputy, a
semi-pro wrestler, and—according to a YouTube search—he appears to be a public urinator.

But
for Glanz and then-Undersheriff Brian Edwards, the hulking 6-foot-3,
260-pound Crittenden was such a pest, they ordered him to take not just
one, but up to five different polygraph tests, court records show.
Crittenden’s
civil suit, in which ex-deputy Michael Schmauss is also a plaintiff,
has dragged on. Another officer in the legal action died, while a fourth
withdrew himself from the case. (An attorney for Glanz declined to
comment to The Daily Beast about the suit.)
In a bizarre twist, Crittenden is being represented by brothers
Daniel and Donald Smolen—the same attorneys representing the Harris
family. The barristers have made a nightly habit of basking in the
limelight of cable news and crowing about their CNN appearances.
The
Smolens did not return calls for comment on Crittenden’s case. Earlier
this week, though, lawyer Donald Smolen had dangled the prospect of
releasing a bombshell affidavit on Bates’s training to a Daily Beastreporter.
Harris’s death has brought on a pall of radio silence around Tulsa.
When The Daily Beast reached law enforcement and plaintiffs in
Crittenden’s civil case, calls were quickly dropped. A police source
told The Daily Beast that the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office has
imposed a gag order on its employees. (The Sheriff’s Office did not
answer requests for comment on any gag order.)
The Crittenden case highlights how one deputy allegedly earned a
reputation as a bad apple in the sheriff’s good ol’ boys club. Back in
the day, the heavyweight was the ultimate showman, and even prisoners at
the Tulsa County jail were in his corner.
“Sometimes people who
have been inmates ... will come find me down here,” said Crittenden in
1998, referring to a bowling alley that held wrestling matches. “They
will even bring their kids and their wife and tell them what a good guy
they think I am and how they respected me as an officer.”
Years
later, following a tip from a citizen, the sheriff launched an internal
probe into whether Crittenden “engaged in improper behavior with a woman
who was an exotic dancer at the [Foxx Hole Lounge] in Tulsa County,”
said Captain Rob Lillard in a June 2012 court declaration.
The sheriff’s department wanted to know if Crittenden had warned the
jiggle joint of an impending search warrant, so they administered a
polygraph test, which officials told him he flunked, according to court
records.
The 16-year veteran of the Tulsa County Sheriff’s
Office was terminated in 2011, for what he claims in the lawsuit was
retaliation for his workers’ compensation claims for PTSD and
degenerative disc disease.
Still, those claims pale in comparison to the wrestler’s next legal round.
In
January, Crittenden became one of five people charged with first-degree
murder for the fatal shooting of fugitive pimp Michael Jones, 33,
inside of a Super 8 motel. (All have pleaded not guilty.)

Jones was in town from Oklahoma City trying to hustle hookers, police told The Daily Beast.
“Mike Jones was pimping girls and was trying to pick up this girl that
he hooked up with at the casino,” said Sergeant David Walker of the
Tulsa Police Department. “They got a couple rooms and that’s how they
were doing their business.”

The
morning of January 27, Jones and a woman named Pamela Taylor ditched
the Hard Rock Cafe & Casino for the Super 8 Motel. Once inside Room
228, Jones gave Taylor $20 and “demanded sexual favors,” which she
“rebuffed,” according to a police report.
Taylor, 27, said Jones became hostile and “she feared for her
safety,” the report says. She fled and phoned for help. But, as Sergeant
Walker quips, “Instead of calling the police, she called these
upstanding citizens to resolve it.”
Two of the alleged murderers, Kendrick Logan and Jerome Hardaway,
have lengthy violent rap sheets. Jones himself was wanted in Cincinnati
on human-trafficking charges. Logan and Hardaway allegedly marched into
the hotel with Crittenden as backup to “rough up” Jones.
Somehow the fight led to gunfire, and Jones was fatally blasted in
the chest, according to police. Logan and Taylor fled in a blue Mustang,
while Hardaway hitched a ride in Crittenden’s white 2006 Ford F-150,
police said.
Crittenden was alone when cops busted him around noon
after he rear-ended a car. The fallen wrestler told officers he was
coerced and went along with the motel beatdown because he was held at
gunpoint, according to police and friends of Crittenden.
Sgt. Walker wasn’t buying it. “This flies in the face of what we looked at,” he said. “He can claim whatever he wants.”
Crittenden’s
version of the aftermath has him hightailing to the police station.
Again, Sergeant Walker calls this fiction. “If he was going to the
police station and wrecked his car, he had already missed it by a
quarter-mile,” he said. “He just rear-ended the car and it was divine
intervention on Crittenden.”
Brett Swab, the attorney representing Crittenden in his murder case, told The Daily Beast
he believes the wrestler will be exonerated. “Whatever has been
reported is erroneous … There wasn’t a thorough investigation done,”
Swab said.
Wrestling buddy Thomas Demos—who fights under the handle “StepStool
Tommy D”—says “The Real Deal” doesn’t hang with gangbangers. Crittenden
was trying to stay alive for his autistic son, Demos said.
“They
made him go along with them and said: ‘If you run, we’ll kill you,’”
said Demos, 47, who says he gets intel from pals who visit Crittenden.
“He got caught up in it and couldn’t get away from them because these
guys had guns. The reason he didn’t fight back and kept himself alive
was because of his son. He loves his boy so much.”
Demos says The Real Deal was planning a pro-wrestling comeback. “He
was trying to build his body up,” the pint-sized powerhouse said, adding
that his pal was also serving as a coach to sprouting grapplers.
“He
wanted to help younger wrestlers and do more for his community and
thought it was his calling to bring them to Jesus,” Demos said.